Sciences of Modernism Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology

Sciences of Modernism examines key points of contact between British literature and the human sciences of ethnography, sexology and psychology at the dawn of the twentieth century. The book is divided into sections that pair exemplary scientific texts from the period with literary ones, charting numerous collaborations and competitions occurring between science and early modernist literature. Paul Peppis investigates this exchange through close readings of literary works by Claude McKay, E. M. Forster, Mina Loy, Rebecca West and Wilfred Owen, alongside science books by Alfred Haddon, Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, Bernard Hart and William Brown. In so doing, Peppis shows how these competing disciplines participated in the formation and consolidation of modernism as a broad cultural movement across a range of critical discourses. His study will interest students and scholars of the history of science, literary modernism, and English literature more broadly.

Introduction; Part I. Ethnographies: 1. Salvage ethnography, cultural cross-dressing, and autoethnography in A. C. Haddon's Head-Hunters: Black, White and Brown; 2. Salvaging dialect, cultural cross-dressing, and antiethnographic autoethnography in Claude McKay's Constab Ballads; Part II. Sexologies: 3. Homosexual Bildung and sexological modernism in Havelock Ellis and John A. Symonds's Sexual Inversion and E. M. Forster's Maurice; 4. Re-writing sex: sexology and sentimental modernism in Marie Stopes's Married Love and Mina Loy's Songs to Joannes; Part III. Psychologies: 5. Treating trauma, modernizing narrative: Bernard Hart's The Psychology of Insanity and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier; 6. 'Mental Cases': forms of shellshock in William Brown's Psychology and Psychotherapy and Poems by Wilfred Owen; Conclusion.

Paul Peppis is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 2000) and has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge, 2007) and The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (Cambridge, 2007). He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.